Did the B12 pander to Bevo at the expense of other members?

Yes

No

Me don't know but me like voting

This was a question asked by a Cal fan on the CU Scout board. He was wondering why there seems to be so much hate directed at Texas. I re-posted what I told him below and would love to get everyone's thoughts both on the issue and whether what I said is fair or accurate.

Let's see:

1. We were going to expand the Big 8 to ten teams but went to 12 because Texas demanded it. It then became a new conference instead of an expansion with new bylaws, new record books, etc.

2. As part of this process, the Texas legislature demanded that to get Bevo we had to take Baylor over our choice, which was TCU.

3. Many of the Big 12 members were concerned that, with the state of Texas having the dominant media markets (Dallas-Ft Worth and Houston) and by far the most fertile recruiting grounds, that creating geographic divisions would give the South way too many advantages. Instead of splitting teams into separate divisions, the Big 12 caved to Bevo's demands and ended up with the North-South alignment. Bevo has had a situation where it only has to leave the state 1 time for conference games in some years since the Oklahoma game is played in Dallas and sometimes OSU and 2/3 of the games vs the North are in Austin.

4. The hub of the Big 8 had always been Kansas City, the near-central point for all the member schools in Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. Bevo successfully lobbied to move conference offices to Dallas.

5. The conference championship game was rotated between Kansas City and a Texas location for the first many years of the Big 12. Bevos successfully lobbied to move the conference championship game permanently to Dallas.

There's been other stuff, including issues around the unequal revenue sharing. But those were some of the big things that paint the picture. If you look at Beebe's current plan for saving the Big 12 with only 10 members, it includes a clause that gives Bevo the ability to create its own television network and not share any of the revenue it generates with other members.

Bottom line is I love the numbers for the PAC if we expand with Bevo and its cabal. But in a lot of ways it's making a deal with the devil. I just hope that the California cabal in the PAC has the will to stand up to them and not make any special concessions. It seems Bevo won round one, since they've already forced Texas Tech and Oklahoma State on the PAC (2 institutions that bring no additional televisions, no benefit to conference academic prestige, and are terrible fits with conference culture). At least the conference stood its ground on Baylor.

I guess the bottom line is that the Bevo cabal will try to end PAC culture by turning this into a merger instead of a conference expansion. If you read the online articles from Texas and Oklahoma, they almost always use the word "merger". The PAC needs to be very careful here. There's a reason why Bevo has now killed two athletic conferences despite the on-field and on-court success of those conferences.

P.S. Remember what they say about what happens when you make a deal with the devil. The devil doesn't change. You do.

Yes. But, adding the Texas teams needed to happen. The Big Eight was doomed back then because of the shifting college landscape and the lack of media markets and TVs.

Kind of like now.

In short, the Big Eight/12 was/is doomed for the same reason.

Click to expand...

mmmmmmaaaaaaayyyybe... I think had the B12 added UT and A&M without Baylor and Tech, and added Utah and BYU, it would have formed a far stronger conference that wouldn't be falling apart today. Also, had the B12 gone to an equal revenue sharing model, and perhaps put some caps on AD spending, we'd be very strong now.
But that didn't happen. The Texas legislature got involved. Once that happens, you can forget about it.